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ART REVIEW; The Olympics As They Were

If boxing and wrestling today seem a tad on the brutal side, consider pankration, an ancient Olympic sport that was a model of dirty fighting. A no-holds-barred combination of the two, it allowed choking, scratching, slapping, kicking, punching the genitals, leg tripping, finger bending and flipping an opponent overhead. A judge watched over the two opponents, ready with a stick to strike the perpetrator of fouls like biting and eye-gouging.

The sport, if such it can be called, was added to the Olympic program about 75 years after the Games began, according to historians, in 776 B.C. And it is vividly depicted in sculptures and vase painting of the era, along with more refined contests like running, chariot racing, discus and javelin throwing, long jumping and others, including the pentathlon, a combination of five events performed in one day.

Three current museum displays, one tangential, are presented in tune with next month's Olympics in Athens, the first to which the Greek city has played host since the Games were revived in the 19th century. The most comprehensive, in terms of exhibits and catalog, is ''Games for the Gods: The Greek Athlete and the Olympic Spirit,'' a splendid survey dealing with the spirit and substance of the Olympics at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

On display are more than 180 objects ranging in date from about 1350 B.C. to the end of the fourth century A.D., when the Games were discontinued. (Their modern revival was largely a result of the efforts of a Frenchman, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, at the end of the 19th century, and they have been held every four years since 1908 except during the world wars.)

The show, billed as the first major American exhibition devoted to Greek athletes, is drawn from Boston's own considerable holdings, with major loans from other institutions and private collectors. It was organized by John J. Herrmann Jr., curator of classical art, and Christine Kondoleon, curator of Greek and Roman art at the museum.

A stunning lineup of painted vessels, sculptures, coins, a mural, ancient sports equipment and other objects, it also presents for contrast a group of photographs and video images of modern-day athletes, from Eadweard Muybridge's 1880's motion studies of boxing and discus throwing to contemporary action shots like Herb Ritts's photo of the track and field champion Jackie Joyner-Kersee and John Huet's glimpse from the rear of the superrunner Michael Johnson.

The original Olympic event was the footrace, run naked and, in contrast to today's races with their high-tech footwear, shoeless. It remained the only event for the first 50 years of the Games. The race was roughly 200 yards, a measure called a stadion (hence stadium). So revered were the winners that the four-year periods after their victories were named for them, the first being Koroibos of Elis in 776 B.C.

Several vase paintings in the show depict runners in action, among them a black-figured amphora from about 540 B.C. showing three bearded, powerfully thighed nude sprinters, arms held high, dashing for the finish line. (Competitors were on their own, there being no such thing as team sports.) Another, dated about 480 B.C., has three younger men almost neck-and-neck, their hair flying and limbs pumping madly as they tear along.

Over time, other events were added to the program, with chariot racing, brought in around 680 B.C., the most exciting, not to mention glamorous. A sport in which only the rich could participate, since horses and their care were costly even then, it involved maneuvering a skinny two-wheeled platform fronted by a waist-high guardrail, drawn by two or four steeds speeding over a tough course. Spectacular accidents occurred, as in car racing today. Owners did not usually participate; the chariots were driven by professionals, much as racehorses today are ridden by hired jockeys.

Visitors to the show are greeted by a reproduction of the famous ''Charioteer,'' a life-size bronze found at Delphi, a noble figure wearing the long white charioteer's tunic that was the only clothing Olympic participants were permitted. Vase paintings of charioteers bent over their railings as they goad their horses are prominent here.

But among them is a different painting, on a tall, ornate vessel for bath water, from about 320 to 310 B.C. It relates to the legend of Pelops, a prince from Asia Minor who fell for Hippodameia and won her hand by beating her overprotective father, Oinomaos, king of Pisa, in a chariot race. Pelops bribed Oinomaos's charioteer to sabotage the king's vehicle by substituting wax fittings for the metal ones, causing it to break apart during the race, throwing the king to his death. On this vase, Pelops is shown seated triumphantly beside his beloved on a more capacious horse-drawn vehicle. The legend is said to establish him as the father of the chariot race.

Highly important to the Games were the preparations and rituals around them. Athletics were prized in ancient Greece; they were part of the requisite cultural training for upper-class youth, and every city worth the name had a sports complex, composed of a gymnasium and a palaistra, where combat sports and long jumping were practiced. The grounds were also sites for training in philosophy and music. Socrates, shown in a Roman copy of a Greek portrait head by Lysippos (fourth century B.C.), probably held cerebral discussions in such complexes.

A section of the exhibition devoted to the training grounds depicts -- on vases, sculpture, coins and such -- the care athletes gave to their bodies, showing various sports that were practiced to music, as well as the important cleansing process of oiling the skin and scraping it with a curved instrument called a strigil.

A lively Athenian vase painting from about 520 to 515 B.C. portrays two athletes jumping to the rhythms of a flute player who tootles away beside them. The cleansing ritual is vividly shown on a drinking cup from 500 to 475 B.C. depicting athletes in a palaistra setting as they scrape olive oil off their bodies. In another vase painting an athlete presents his strigil to a dog to lick.

Greek women were forbidden not only to participate in the major games but also to watch them. (Exceptions were sometimes made for unmarried girls in the company of male relatives.) But the women held a quadrennial event of their own, called Heraea, starting in the sixth century B.C. A vase dating from 440 to 430 B.C. shows three nude young women clustered around a bath basin in a gymnasium, cleaning the oil from their bodies with strigils, attended by a female slave.

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Although Olympic-style games were mentioned earlier in Homer's ''Iliad,'' the festival as we know it began in the eighth century B.C. as a summer event devoted to Zeus in the Peloponnesian city of Olympia, an important center of Zeus-worship. In the sixth century B.C. three other important athletic festivals were founded along Olympic lines: the Pythian Games at Delphi, the Isthmian Games at Corinth and the Nemean Games at Nemea.

The Olympics remained the top draw, but the four formed a circuit of ''crown games,'' so called because the prizes were monetarily worthless wreaths or crowns of sacred leaves. An additional festival that offered prizes of real value was the Panathenaic Games in Athens, founded in 566 B.C., whose winners were given big amphorae, or vases, filled with 42 quarts of precious olive oil from sacred groves in Attica. The front of each of these vases was traditionally embellished with the image of a fully armed Athena; the back depicted the event for which the vase was awarded. (The winner of the prestigious chariot race received as many as 140 amphorae.)

The Panathenaic Games are highlighted in ''The Games in Ancient Athens: A Special Presentation to Celebrate the 2004 Olympics'' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show's stars are nine of the extra-large painted Panathenaic prizes, dating from the sixth to the fourth centuries B.C. and owned by the museum. In lieu of a larger exhibition, the Met -- a heavy lender to the Boston display -- has showcased the nine vases and additional works in its first-floor Greek galleries. It has also set up a kind of treasure hunt for visitors by marking other Olympic-related art throughout the display.

Among the vases is one from 525 to 500 B.C. attributed to the Kleophrades Painter, credited with the largest number of extant prize amphorae of any Athenian vase painter. It depicts a pankration with one opponent grasping the other's leg as a judge stands by with a stick. Another vase by an unknown but gifted painter, circa 540 to 530 B.C., bears a beautifully stylized version of a two-horse chariot race. The earliest Panathenaic vessel in the Met's collection, dated 566 to 550 B.C., is also anonymous. It shows three sprinters prancing along in a stadion race.

Other Olympic-themed treasures marked in the galleries include a poignant marble funeral monument from around 530 B.C. More than 13 feet tall and topped by a sphinx, it stood at the tomb of one Megakles, a youth of apparently aristocratic family, who is depicted lifesize with an athlete's aryballos, or oil flask, strapped to his wrist and holding a pomegranate, symbolic of both death and fertility, in his hand.

A handsome full-length stone statue -- a Roman copy of a Greek bronze circa 430 B.C. by Polykleitos, one of the best-known artists of the ancient world -- shows a youth in the act of adorning his head with a wreath after an athletic victory. Polykleitos' brilliance is evident in the rhythmic play between the torso and the thorax, each tilting slightly in opposite directions, and in the lifelike separation of the feet that gives the otherwise placid statue a sense of movement.

The Met's galleries of Greek and Roman art, housing one of the museum world's most important collections, are a treat to visit anyway, but this special treasure-hunting expedition enlivens the experience.

Women, largely left out of these two exhibitions, are given some of their due in a lively show, ''The Sporting Woman: The Female Athlete in American Culture,'' at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in Massachusetts.

Not exactly pegged to the Olympics (its opening coincided with the 2004 United States Women's Open Championship, held at the college's Orchards Golf Course this summer), it nevertheless touches on Olympic participants like the swimmer Gertrude Ederle, the all-around athlete Babe Didrikson Zaharias and the soccer player Brandi Chastain (here shown in a photograph by Anacleto Rapping as she exuberantly removes her shirt after scoring the winning goal in the 1999 World Cup).

One strong intent of the show, organized by Marianne Doezema, director of the museum, is to point up the difficulties experienced by women in entering the world of traditionally male sports. It fittingly begins with Winslow Homer's painting ''Croquet Players'' (1865), a leisurely game then regarded, for women, primarily as an opportunity to flirt with men. Horseback riding for pleasure, the show points out in text and images, was the first active sport to become acceptable for women, who were nevertheless restricted to riding sidesaddle to protect their sex organs.

A breakthrough occurred at the turn of the 20th century when the bicycle, which could not be ridden sidesaddle, became popular with both sexes. ''Ride a Stearns and Be Content,'' proclaimed an 1896 poster by Edward Penfield that knowingly touted a bicycle with a specially designed short seat. (''The bicycle has done more for the emancipation of women than anything else in the world,'' Susan B. Anthony said in 1896.)

The show traces, with actual examples, the slow modernization of women's outfits for swimming, calisthenics, tennis, riding and the like from corsets and long skirts to comfortable garb like that of male athletes. And it describes, through paintings, photographs and objects, the gradual recognition of women's emerging role in some of the most popular spectator sports, like soccer, basketball, softball and track.

Today many of the most widely followed events in world competition include women, the show points out. Although there's plenty of room for more recognition, the Olympics and other competitions make clear that female champions are a fact of life.

''Games for the Gods: The Greek Athlete and the Olympic Spirit'' is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 465 Huntington Avenue, (617) 267-9300, through Nov. 28. ''The Games in Ancient Athens: A Special Presentation to Celebrate the 2004 Olympics'' is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, (212) 535-7710, through Oct. 3. ''The Sporting Woman: The Female Athlete in American Culture'' is at Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, Lower Lake Road, South Hadley, Mass., (413) 538-2245, through Aug. 1.